If you are just joining us, here is my introductory post detailing each week’s discussion topics and this wonderful roundup over at Kim’s blog, which highlights some of the great recommendations from all the participants last week. Remember, you can post any day this week, just remember to pop back to this post and add your link to the Linky below so I can share your post!

Now! Onto this week’s topic. For the second week of Nonfiction November, we are discussing Book Pairings. The original intention of this week’s theme was put together a fiction book and a nonfiction book that go well together. If you decide to pair two nonfiction books together, that works too! It could be two (or more!) books you’ve read, one book you’ve read and one you have not, or two books that you’ve added to your TBR and want to read that you think will complement and inform each other.

I’m going with a fiction book I’ve read about a topic I really want to learn more about:

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi is easily one of my favorite reads of this year. It chronicles a western United States in the not-so-distant future that is barely hanging on. Texas has been abandoned for lack of water and refugees are traveling west to find new homes. The wealthy live in pristine gated communities and never worry about their water running out, but that means that someone has to fight for those water rights. A Las Vegas water knife, or a soldier who fights to secure water rights using any means necessary, is sent to the dying Phoenix to check up on a colleague who has been acting strange. There he crosses paths with a reporter who is on the brink of uncovering something dangerous and a Texas refugee just trying to survive any way she can.

It’s a fast-paced, dark novel with incredible characters and fascinating world building. It is recognizably the United States and it feels possible, which makes it all the more terrifying. But the truth is, what I know about the real drought in California and climate change is pretty limited to what I read in headlines and short articles, so I thought I would put together a list of nonfiction titles I could read about the topic.

The first thing I learned is that there are so many. It felt impossible to narrow it down! So I tried to pick books published in 2015, with two exceptions.

Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin – This is my first exception. Published in late 2014, this is a part of Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series and it seems like the perfect place to start when it comes to understanding a complex topic such as climate change.

A Great Aridness by William Debuys – This was published in 2013, but the topic is right on point. A Great Aridness focuses on the Western United States and its future without water. According to the summary, this book discusses the future of the Colorado River as a major water source for the western US, which is a big plot point in The Water Knife. Reviews say the book is beautifully written and I’m looking forward to this one!

The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climactic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow by B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam – As the title suggests, this book seems to have a very similar focus to A Great Aridness, but I decided to leave it on the list, because it was published in 2015. I am also intrigued that this book seems to take the approach of looking at the climate history of the western US to predict what will happen in the future.

Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall – Some of the recent studies about climate change that have been released are downright terrifying, but they don’t seem to mobilizing anyone to make to changes. This book looks at why, from a psychological point of view, it seems to be difficult for us to actually do anything about it and how to find common ground to actually come to a solution. It’s a very interesting way to look at the issue and definitely jumped out at me as a book I’d like to read.

Betting the Farm on a Drought by Seamus McGraw – So we have one overview, two books looking at a specific region as a way of talking about climate change on a global scale, and one book about the psychology behind our reactions to climate change. This last book is about the human side of climate change. McGraw speaks to a wide range of people – farmers, fishermen, scientists and politicians – to get a portrait of the human impact of climate change with the hope of starting conversation and, hopefully, changing minds.

I can’t wait to read your book pairings! Don’t forget to add your link to the linky below and check back on Friday to get a rundown of what everyone discussed!

Happy Nonfiction November!! This week, we’re discussing how 2015 has been for our nonfiction reading, hosted by the wonderful Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness. Don’t forget to head over to Kim’s blog to add your link!

This has been an unusual reading year for me. Now that I don’t live in the city and I don’t commute for work, I’ve lost a big chunk of my reading time. A typical day for me in 2014 involved almost two hours of uninterrupted reading time a day on the subway. Now that my commute is from my bedroom to my home office, I’m having a hard time carving out the same amount of time to read! I’ve only read 44 books so far this year. A typical year for me has usually been well over one hundred. I don’t mind that I’ll probably only get to just over 50 books read for the year, but let me just say, it makes me so much pickier about what I read. And so much more upset when I read a book I didn’t like!

Now, reduction in reading aside, I’ve actually read more nonfiction so far this year than any year before. I definitely attribute this to Nonfiction November’s influence! I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks and I’ve found that I really enjoy nonfiction on audio. Here is what I’ve read or listened to so far in 2015:

brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

El Deafo by Cece Bell

Liar Temptress Soldier Spy by Karen Abbott

Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang

Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

On Immunity by Eula Biss

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

What is your favorite nonfiction read of the year?

I was absolutely blown away by brown girl dreaming, Jaqueline Woodson’s memoir in verse. It’s a beautiful book of poetry, memoir, and shows that nonfiction can be more than just prose. It’s a powerful piece of writing.

Being Mortal by Atul Gwande is also a powerful book about death and dying in the United States in three parts. I have to admit, this was a difficult book to listen to in some parts. The first section is all about the human body and the aging process. The second focuses on problems in the nursing home and assisted living industry and what can be done to increase quality of life in the last stage of life. Finally, GaMwande analyzes the ways medicine has failed the dying, especially those suffering from terminal illnesses. While Being Mortal was not always the easiest book to listen to, it’s the most important nonfiction books I read this year.

What nonfiction book have you recommended the most?

If we’re not just talking about books I’ve read this year, I’d say Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer.It always, weirdly, seems to come up in conversations. Parasites are everywhere!

What is one topic or type of nonfiction you haven’t read enough of?

So much!! But this year, especially, there seems to be a lack of comics nonfiction in my reading. Unfortunately, my new library system is really lacking in the comics department. I usually read quite a few, but this year just one: El Deafo by Cece Bell. I also really want to read more biographies and history books.

What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

Reading more nonfiction, of course, but also reading all of your blog posts! You always recommend such great nonfiction and I can’t wait to add to my ever-growing TBR. I’m currently reading And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts and up next on the TBR is I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai for our readalong discussion. I’ve also downloaded The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (a book I found out about through Nonfiction November), H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor, and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott on audiobook. I doubt I’ll get to all four of those, but I do have quite a bit of work driving this month, so I should at least get through two.

What about you? I can’t wait to read through your Nonfiction November posts this week! Be sure to stop by Sophisticated Dorkiness to add your link to the list so we don’t miss out.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – I read Jane Eyre before I could truly understand it. I had seen the movie and I was drawn to the dark, dreariness of it. The unease that permeates throughout. Most of all, I liked Jane. There was also probably a hint of wanting to impress people by the fact that I was reading Jane Eyre. I remember the actual physical book vividly – it was red, leather bound and much nicer than the other books in my middle school library. It had a ribbon bookmark. (An aside: does anyone else remember the way their middle school library smelled? In my memory, most of middle school took place in the library.) I hadn’t revisited Jane Eyre in many years, but it turns out that middle school me and 2014 me have very similar tastes. This time, I listened to the book on audio as I drove around Virginia for my job during the fall. It seems to me that this has been a particularly rainy fall and winter and that was perfect for listening to Jane Eyre on long drives. I am still drawn to Jane and the mystery of it all, the atmosphere, the language, Mr. Rochester and his lying ways. This year, I’d love to watch all the Jane Eyre movie adaptations to compare them and read books that have been inspired by Jane Eyre, like Wide Sargasso Sea.

The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland – When I was working in publishing, I didn’t blog about the books published by my company because it felt like a conflict of interest. That was the right thing to do, but I didn’t get to tell you about some really great books. Since I’ve switched jobs, I’m very excited to share them with you. The Transcriptionist is a quiet novel, one that can almost seem like it’s leading to something bigger, but don’t be disappointed when it doesn’t. The book starts out with a mystery, but this is a book that asks questions and doesn’t answer them. And that’s what I loved about it. It’s about a woman named Lena, a mysterious death, newspapers, technology, coincidence, war, life and death and what it means to be alone. Big questions with no easy answers.

The Three by Sarah Lotz – So, I’m really not a great flyer. It seems like it would be a horrible idea for me to read this book, about three plane crashes on the same day that the world believes are somehow connected. And it was! It was terrifying! But what I actually loved about this novel was the structure. It’s a book within a book and uses found documents, like chat and video transcripts, letters, and interviews. I didn’t necessarily expect this book to make my list of the best books of the year, but I keep thinking about the structure months after reading it. It managed to maintain the suspense and use the technique to its advantage. The other book I read this year that tried to do the same thing, The Supernatural Enhancements, let the structure get in the way of the actual story. I can’t imagine The Three being told any other way.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng – I only read Everything I Never Told You a few weeks ago, but I knew immediately that it was going to be one of the best books I read this year. On its surface, it’s a story that’s been told many times in literary fiction and crime fiction: a teenage girl goes missing and her family must deal with the aftermath. But this book takes every cliche from that tired story and turns it on its head. The Lees stand out in their small Ohio town in the 70s as the only interracial family. James Lee, the patriarch, wants nothing more than for his family to blend in. Marilyn Lee hates the homemaker life she has fallen into, so pushes all her medical school aspirations on her oldest daughter Lydia. When Lydia goes missing, James and Marilyn and their two remaining children, Nathan and Hannah, are left to untangle where it all went wrong. I can’t recommend this book enough.

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay – An Untamed State is a difficult book to read and it’s a book that’s going to stay with me for a long time. Mireille, American-born and of Haitian descent, is visiting her parents’ estate in Haiti with her midwestern white husband and their infant daughter when she is kidnapped. Kidnappings are common in Haiti and her wealthy father refuses to give into the kidnappers’ demands, leading to a horrific two weeks of brutality for Mireille. When Mireille is finally released, she is shattered physically and emotionally and must somehow heal and learn how to live and love again after this horrible thing has happened. An Untamed State is the kind of novel that makes you feel. Anger, disgust, horror, and grief. But also hope and forgiveness.

Someone by Alice McDermott – This was one of the first books I read in 2014, for my book club, and I just knew it was going to stick with me. It has. It’s about the life of one ordinary woman named Marie. It’s a portrait of her and her life, her sadnesses and triumphs, that moves forward and backward in time with a beautiful fluidity. It’s one of the few books I reviewed this year, so I talk about it in a lot more detail here. Also, do yourself a favor. If you’re going to buy this novel, please buy the hardcover. It’s so understated, it’s hard to tell online, but it’s one of the most beautiful books I own. The buildings and text on the cover and the spine are this lovely metallic copper color and it’s just lovely.

Every year, Jaime at the Perpetual Page-Turner puts together this great End of Year survey. It’s just a fun way to look back on your reading year. I took most of December off from blogging, which was much needed, but I’m ready to get back into the swing of things with a full week of best of 2014 and looking ahead to 2015. To kick it off, I’m going to start with the year-end survey! I always pick the questions that are most relevant to my reading life, so be sure to check out the full survey if you’d like to add it to your blog, too!

Reading Stats

Number of Books Read: 102 and I’m expecting to read a few more before the week is over.Number of Rereads: 3Genre You Read the Most From: Fantasy – 39 books.

Best In Books

Best book read in 2014? Like I could pick just one! Someone by Alice McDermott, The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland, Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt, Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz, and Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Book I was excited about and thought I was going to love more: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. A Secret History is one of my favorite books, so I had high hopes for The Goldfinch. While I liked it a lot, it’s definitely not one I’ll read again.

Most surprising book: I’m going to go with most surprising series – The Vampire Academy series and the Bloodlines series. I devoured these this year and really loved them, which I wasn’t expecting! They aren’t perfect books, but I liked the world building a lot and cared about the characters.

Book I pushed the most people to read: I’m constantly telling people to read The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater

Best series I started in 2014: Bloodlines!

Favorite new author: I think everyone discovered Roxane Gay this year, but An Untamed State was one of the best books I read this year. Celeste Ng is another author I’m eager to read again and Lin Enger, author of The High Divide.

Most action-packed/thrilling/unputdownable book of the year: The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero and The Three by Sarah Lotz

Book I’m most likely to reread next year: I like to wait at least a year or so in between rereads, so probably nada.

Favorite cover:

Most memorable character of 2014: Jane Eyre

Most beautifully written book of 2014: Talking to the Dead by Helen Dunmore and Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman (Goal: read more beautiful books in 2014)

Most thought-provoking book of 2014: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

Book I Can’t Believe I Waited Until 2014 to Read: The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield – I won this galley in a Twitter contest ages ago and it had been sitting on my shelf for a long while. I ended up loving it and I’m sorry it sat on my shelf for so long!

Favorite passage? From Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman:

The letters are sitting right here, bound in dirty string so they can’t come open too easily, so they can’t steal my nights as I look for secrets in their creases. Mama developed Grandma’s preference for onionskin paper too, and felt-tip, I wait for this to happen to me, I’m certain it will. The only way to tell the difference between Mama’s letters and Grandma’s at first glance is that Mama’s stay bundled up so tight the string rips into their pages and Grandma’s are loose and open, all over this table. I keep Mama’s letters closed, keep their edges close together like a cut that needs force to heal. I’m all wrapped up in there, jumbled with her, small i‘s and slashes, her story in my story at every turn.

Favorite book read in 2014 from an author I’ve read previously: Locke & Key and Saga volumes 2 and 3

Best book I read in 2014 based on a recommendation: Wild Ones by Jon Mooallem based on a recommendation from Aarti

Best debut I read in 2014? Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Best worldbuilding? Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

Book that put a smile on my face: Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson and

Book that made me cry: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Hidden gem of the year: I want everyone to read David R. Dow, so I’m going to say Things I Learned from Dying by David R. Dow

Book that crushed my soul: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Most unique book of 2014: The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero – Though this style of book isn’t really unique, it was definitely the most unique book I read in 2014!

Book that made me the most mad: An Untamed State by Roxane Gay made me viscerally angry about the horrible things that people can do to each other.

Looking Ahead

One book I didn’t get to in 2014 that will be a priority in 2015: I’ve already picked out my first book of the year for 2015 and it’s going to be My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which I’ve only heard good things about.

Book I am most anticipating for 2015: The third book in the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patric Rothfuss, Doors of Stone, does not have an official release date, but the rumor is that it will be in 2015. Fingers crossed!

One thing I hope to do in my reading life: For every book by a white person, I would like to read a book by a person of color and keep up my trend of reading more books by women. I’m going to do a more detailed post about my 2014 stats and my 2015 reading goals, so keep an eye out for that this week!

A kitsune is a fox from Japanese folktale tradition. It can be a shapeshifter. It often has many tails. The kitsune can be a trickster. After finishing Fog Island Mountain, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the kitsune folktales and it makes me want to go through and read this novella again with new eyes, keeping watch for elements of the kitsune tradition.

This novel is about grief, about tragedy, about storms literal and figurative, and how we weather them. When South African expat Alec learns he has cancer, he waits for his wife Kanae to meet him at the hospital. She does not come. Instead she races away from Komachi, their small Japanese town, and tries to escape the dread and fear of her husband’s death by pretending he is already dead, that she is already living as a widow. She is wrecked by the thought of being left by him and so she leaves him. Meanwhile, a typhoon is coming, threatening with destructive winds and torrential rains. The story of Kanae, Alec, and Komachi is told by Azami, the oldest inhabitant of Komachi and the daughter of a famous poet and storyteller.

Fog Island Mountains is a slim book, a novella, that tells a complex story of grief and loss and love. It’s lovely and told in a style reminiscent of folklore while still painting the characters in stark relief. We don’t have very many pages to get to know and understand Kanae and Alec and their children. We don’t necessarily know all of their motivations or every step that brought them to these decisions, but you trust that they are genuine. Even minor characters are elegantly written.

The actual plot of this novel only covers a few days, which is one of my favorite devices in fiction, and Fog Island Mountains was no exception. This story, though, is about more than just the few days, it’s about a lifetime of love between Kanae and Alec, it’s about childhood and adulthood, it’s about a town, and it’s about stories.

Fog Island Mountains was awarded the Christopher Doheny Award for fiction, which is an award “which recognizes excellence in fiction or nonfiction on the topic of serious illness by a writer who has personally dealt or is dealing with life-threatening illness.” Fog Island Mountains is about the choices we make when we are faced with illness, with life and death, with grief, even the anticipation of grief. The person that comes out when we are faced with the inevitable but impossible to imagine is not always a person we are proud of. Fog Island Mountains is compassionate and forgiving when it comes to these moments.

Fog Island Mountains is such a fast read, but filled with small moments I’m sure I missed, especially after reading more about the kitsune tradition that inspired the novel. It’s a novel I plan on revisiting.

I received a review copy of Fog Island Mountains by Michelle Bailat-Jones from TLC Book Tours. You can read more about this novel and see the other tour dates here.

I first downloaded The Raven Boys on audio because I thought it was a different book. It was an excellent mistake.

I first fell in love with The Raven Boys because of the narrator, Will Patton. The particular lilt of his voice is beautiful, the cadence like poetry or song. It calms me. I always keep an audiobook from The Raven Cycle downloaded on my phone so I can pick a point in the middle of the story and listen if I’m feeling nervous. I especially like to listen to it on airplanes.

It was more than just the narration of The Raven Boys that made it great, of course. I do think that Will Patton could read me the phone book and I would be happy, but Stiefvater’s prose is like magic, effortless and intricate and lovely and surprising. Sentences that shouldn’t work do. Things that should sound cheesy instead just sound right and like there is simply no other way to describe it.

It’s everything else that keeps me coming back for more. The characters are complex. Good and bad. No one is wholly evil and no one is wholly good. The characters surprise and charm Now that I’m back in Virginia, I’ve been enjoying the setting even more. I’m originally from Virginia and I’ve been spending a lot of time in the area where Henrietta is supposed to be. It’s just fun to read about places and landscapes you recognize, people you could know. I’m looking forward to more explanation of the magic, but oh how I love the combination of folklore and psychic powers and traditions.

When I first got The Dream Thieves, I read it much too quickly. I didn’t want to make that same mistake with Blue Lily, so I savored it and it is everything you have come to expect from this series. It is much less like a series than one continuous novel that has just been broken up into chunks, which is not a complaint. I’m looking forward to reading them all cover to cover one day.

We spent The Raven Boys getting to know our characters. The Dream Thieves was all about the magic of Cabeswater and two different dreamers. Blue Lily, Lily Blue is much more about moving the plot along to some kind of conclusion, though not without character development (so much Noah!) and more exploration of the magic that lives on the ley line. I loved that we got to know the women of Fox Way a little bit more in this installment.

It’s just nice to find a story to get lost in again.

I received a promotional copy of Blue Lily, Lily Blue from the publisher.